Striking Distance Studios (SDS) released their first game The Callisto Protocol in December 2022. Published by KRAFTON, this all-new story-driven survival horror game is set in the year 2320 and challenges its players to take on the role of Jacob Lee, an inmate of the horrific Black Iron Prison – a maximum-security penitentiary located on Jupiter’s dead moon, Callisto.
SDS is led by Dead Space and Call of Duty franchise veteran Glen Schofield. The team at SDS has a passion for their craft. In their own words, “we are driven to do what we do, and hold ourselves to high standards, challenging ourselves to push further in a pursuit of excellence.”
Challenges
Developing any game is an epic task, but developing your first game as a studio, with such high expectations, is a daunting challenge. With a large distributed team and numerous external partners, modern development poses a number of challenges:
- How do you get increasingly large builds out to everyone quickly and efficiently when your team is distributed around the world?
- How do you keep the quality bar high when there are so many changes daily across numerous platforms?
- How do you ensure that the game is consistently performant across all areas of the game so that players have a great experience?
The challenge quickly becomes one of logistics: distributing terabytes of builds, collecting huge volumes of crash and performance data across the entire team, while still being able to view and organize this all in one convenient place.
“Building a game releasing across five platforms with hundreds of changes made every day quickly becomes a huge logistics problem in managing data. AccelByte’s Development Toolkit enabled Striking Distance Studios to quickly analyze output from build systems alongside autotest and crash data in a single web accessible portal.” - Mark James, CTO of Striking Distance Studios
Solution: AccelByte Development Toolkit
Striking Distance Studios is using AccelByte Development Toolkit (ADT) to help solve these challenges.
Sharing build across the team: ADT Build Distribution
Towards the end of development, builds of The Callisto Protocol reached upwards of 80 GB, with dozens of builds across numerous platforms being created every day. SDS wanted to be able to create a build for each Perforce changelist that was committed so that they could perform QA and automated tests on them, as well as making those builds available for other stakeholders. In order to do this they needed to be able to push builds to their entire distributed team and external partners quickly and efficiently.
Getting builds to their destination is one thing, but SDS wanted more than this–they wanted to be able to have builds automatically download and install to connected dev kits so that developers could arrive in the morning knowing that they had the latest build installed and ready to go.
SDS also wanted to be able to organize their builds by platform and configuration so that they could maintain multiple builds for each platform simultaneously. They also needed to be able to control who had access to specific builds so they could share them safely.
ADT helped SDS do this by:
- Uploading builds directly from their build machine into ADT. ADT then makes these builds available for anyone to download and install via a single centralized desktop application.
- Using build channels and permissions to organize builds in a flexible and customizable way. Channels were used by SDS to organize builds by platform but also by configuration such as Development, Test or Shipping.
- Marking builds as stable so that QA can test and promote builds that are ready for more general consumption. This saved SDS time by ensuring that only stable builds were available for the majority of developers.
- Connecting dev kits to ADT’s desktop application so that builds can be automatically downloaded and installed when updated.
Monitoring Health: ADT Error Reporting and Performance Profiling
With a game of the size and complexity of The Callistico Protocol, SDS needed to be able to ensure that the game was continually hitting quality and performance metrics. To do this they wanted a platform that could collect builds, sessions, crashes, logs, and performance metrics in one place, in order to build a comprehensive view of the health of The Callisto Protocol at all times.
ADT helped SDS do this by:
- Capturing errors and crashes in The Callisto Protocol at all stages of development. This allowed bugs to be found and fixed as soon as they came up.
- Collecting performance metrics and more detailed UTrace metrics to ensure the game continually met the performance targets they had set across all areas of the game.
- Recording pre-crash videos to give as much context as possible to a crash, making it faster to identify what may have caused it.
- Running automated tests against builds and posting the results against baseline targets so that areas that needed performance improvement could be identified and resolved.
Results
ADT helped Striking Distance Studios successfully maintain game quality and health all the way from the development phase until launch. The results?
- Sharing builds more easily using a user-friendly desktop app that can be used by anyone in the team
- Shorter iteration times leading to more timely and accurate feedback
- Higher quality builds with fewer errors and meeting performance targets
Interested in using AccelByte Development Toolkit? Sign up here.
